PS3-Exclusive Dust 514 To Be ‘Biggest Shooter On The Market’ – CCP

October 10, 2011

Dust 514, the PS3-exclusive MMO shooter, will “easily be the biggest multiplayer FPS on the market,” as far as “scale, depth and volume of content” is concerned, says the developer.

The shooter will feed into CCP’s epic space MMO EVE Online, and vice versa, with Dust 514 representing the efforts of soldiers on the ground – and cross-platform decisions in both games can affect the other.

“For a player fighting on a planet surfaces in DUST 514, the actions of the EVE Online players can trigger epic moments and provide support that is completely user-driven,” Executive Producer Brandon Laurino told the PS blog.

“Similarly, a DUST 514 player could trigger an event from the ground and do something spectacular in EVE Online. This emergent behaviour and gameplay is only possible with our level of connectivity. These are the broad strokes, the gameplay and interactions run a lot deeper than that.”

Laurino added that Dust 514 will include “thousands” of in-game items, which can be purcahsed in-game. “We’re breaking more ground by bringing the microtransaction business model to a console shooter for the first time. All of this was inconceivable not too long ago, and it’s the partnership between CCP and Sony that’s finally making it happen.”

CCP has ambitious plans for the game, claiming that nothing like it has been seen before. “It is the deepest shooter with the richest universe ever conceived and, on top of that, by bringing to market an MMO with microtransactions, we could be changing the face of console gaming forever,” added Laurino. “This is groundbreaking stuff, but user choice is at the core – it’s playing the game however you want to play it.”

The developer also discussed that the beta, due to start before the end of 2011, would be folded into the story of the EVE universe as a ‘thematic rollout’ called “Private Trials”.